Songfacts®:

• Rapunzel is a girl in a German fairytale who is locked in a castle. Each night, she throws down her hair so her suitor can come up and see her. This song is about someone who's in love with a Rapunzel-like figure, feeling like they would do anything just to get to them and be with them. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  alex - p-town, NJ
• Before the band added lyrics, this was an instrumental jam known as "Funk In 5."
• According to the DMB biography Dave Matthews Band: Music For The People by Nevin Martell, before evolving into the romantic story of the golden-haired heroine, the lyrics started out as a humorous description of the tapeworm producer Steve Lillywhite had just gotten removed.
  
  Matthews isn't sure why the final lyrics ended up being an amorous ode to Rapunzel. He told Matt Pinfield: "I don't know where they came from. A lot of the lyrics on this album I wrote the day of recording, and so I'd sit down in the morning and start writing because I hadn't written anything when I got to the vocal, to the singing part of the record. I'd written some of the songs, but not all of them. And so I told Steve that we'd go on break for Christmas and then I'd come back and I'd have all the lyrics written, when we got to record the vocals, but I didn't have any ... I found that once I got in the flow, the songs have a flow, that the songs have a consistency from beginning to end a little more than on some of the other albums, where some of the lyrics had been written over six years, changing them every night."
• At the end of the song, sax player LeRoi Moore can be heard on the phone with someone named Greg ("Hello? Hey Greg. Hey, I can't talk right now. Hello?"). Greg Howard is a Chapman Stick player who performed on the BTCS track "The Dreaming Tree," but he insists the phone call wasn't from him.